So To Speak
In case you were wondering, the interacting processes of respiration, phonation and articulation used in speaking are activated, coordinated and monitored by acoustical and kinesthetic feedback through the nervous system. Whew! Fully half of our 12 cranial nerves send motor fibers to the 50 facial muscles that are involved in the production of speech. Add the industry and auditory effects of the larynx, glottis, palate, tongue, lips, teeth and nose and it is clear: speaking is hard work.
It is also complex. Which is why there are so many branches of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, etymology, syntax and semantics. It is, after all, important to know why words with unvoiced labiodental fricatives and without the power of the plosive can tend toward the unpleasant. Well…isn’t it?
If you’re going to learn more about the components and conventions of speech, then you’ve got to know the jargon. You’ve got to understand how morphemes (not to be confused with phonemes, the first being about meaning, the second sound) build up into words. Morphemes include root words, all manner of fixes (from the usual prefixes and suffixes to the more slangy infixes) and, of course, lexemes.
Tautologically speaking, and all rhetoric aside, you should also be on a first name basis with metonyms, merisms, grammalogs and mondegreens. It would be simply uncouth to publicly trip over your metrical feet: the iams, anapests, and spondees and, especially, the dinosaurian trochees, dactyls and amphibrachs.
Of course, you already know that colophons are not indiscrete body parts, isolons are not subatomic particles and litotes don’t hang in caves. You also know that you can’t buy synecdoche at a French pastry shop and you won’t cure prosopopeia, antonomasia or chiasmus with antibiotics.
You are pretty sure that hypernyms and hyponyms do not reside in Lilliput or Brobdingnag and that neither monosemy nor polysemy are practiced by New Caledonian natives. Despite ongoing concern for your prosody, you would let your kids play with phonopedes; you might not, however, rent out the basement flat to concatenants.
All of these terms come up in The Making of a Name: The Inside Story of the Brands We Buy by Steve Rivkin and Fraser Sutherland (Oxford University Press, 2004). This rather weighty book makes a significant contribution to the science of onomastics…which is the study of the history and forms of proper names (including brand names).
In case you were wondering.
